The Performance Implication of Obsessive Work Passion: Unpacking the Moderating and Mediating Mechanisms from a Conservation of Resources Perspective

Work passion is an important determinant of work performance. While harmonious work passion (HWP) shows its consistent predictive value, obsessive work passion (OWP) appears to have a mixed relationship with work performance. To address this puzzle, we integrate research on OWP and emotional exhaustion with conservation of resources (COR) theory. Specifically, we argue that OWP determines emotional exhaustion, whose relationship with work performance is attenuated by leader-member exchange (LMX). By conducting a field study with a sample of 262 U.S. employees, we found supportive evidence, even when controlling for psychological detachment from work. The findings somewhat reconcile the inconsistent results about OWP and work performance in the literature, shed light on research on work passion, LMX, and emotional exhaustion, and provide implications for managerial practice

Leading Through Conflict: Into the Fray

Effective leadership requires the capacity to successfully manage conflict. This edited volume examines the causes and consequence of conflict in groups, organizations and communities, and identifies ways that conflict can be managed and resolved.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1215/thumbnail.jp

Exploring the Signaling Function of Idiosyncratic Deals and Their Interaction

By adopting signaling theory as the overarching framework and integrating self-determination theory, we examined the signaling function of task i-deals, financial i-deals, and their interaction. Across three studies with varying measures, we found that task i-deals, independently and jointly with financial i-deals, conveyed a positive message regarding competence in that they were positively related to recipients’ competence need satisfaction. In turn, competence need satisfaction positively related to organizational citizenship behaviors. The competence-signaling function of task i-deals and task-financial i-deals interaction remained significant even after accounting for leader-member exchange, organization-based self-esteem, and perceived organizational support. Financial i-deals, however, did not exhibit a competence-signaling function. The current research sheds light on the signaling function of i-deals and their interaction, and provides guidance on the practice of granting one or multiple types of i-deals

Cold, heat, wealth, and culture

This chapter entertains the question of how, or rather, why fundamental freedoms are unevenly distributed around the globe. We propose an explanation in terms of climatic cold and heat ranging from undemanding to demanding, and economic wealth ranging from poor to rich. Fundamental freedoms appear to increase in a stepwise manner in populations faced with threatening (demanding, poor) to unthreatening (undemanding, poor) to unchallenging (undemanding, rich) to challenging (demanding, rich) places of residence. This ecological regularity applies to freedom from ingroup-outgroup discrimination, freedom from hierarchical discrimination, freedom from corruption, freedom from aggression, freedom to trust, and freedom to be creative. As an additional discovery, we find increases in cultural expressions of freedom away from the threatening places of residence around the equator toward the challenging places of residence at higher latitudes in both hemispheres. The observed ecological and latitudinal trends are generalizable across cultural freedoms, across space, and across time.   Many civilizations have worshipped the Sun or the Earth—and for good reasons. If the Sun would shine from farther away or closer up, humankind would freeze to death in the cold or burn to death in the heat. If the Earth would not spin around the Sun and around its own tilted axis, its inhabitants would freeze to death in the one hemisphere with eternal winter or burn to death in the opposite hemisphere with eternal summer. Indeed, the Sun’s radiation and the Earth’s rotation support life. Conversely, all living species on our planet must carefully navigate between climatic cold and heat. These adaptations are particularly relevant to humans, who feed on plants and animals. As a notable consequence, few of our ancestors have migrated to arctic or desert regions, where livability is highly problematic. Elsewhere, our ancestors have created lots of practices and artefacts, including money, to meet basic needs during cold winters or hot summers. So pervasive are these adaptations that we have come to disconnect them from ambient temperatures. This chapter concentrates on population-level connections between thermal climate and societal culture—the shared system of needs and stresses, and embedded behavioral goals, means, and outcomes at the place of residence (Van de Vliert, 2013a). We first describe Hofstede’s (1980) early discovery of some mysterious connections between a country’s distance from the equator and the national culture of its inhabitants. Hofstede speculated that the latitudinal gradient of average temperatures might be ultimately accountable for the latitudinal gradients of cultural individualism and power differences (see also Chapter 3 by Peter Smith for a review of Hofstede’s work). Inspired by recent work (Van Lange, Rinderu, & Bushman, 2017a), we refine that early climate-culture speculation by addressing the broader puzzle of latitudinality. The remaining sections then review and generalize latitude-related evidence of climato-economic pressures on cultural individualism and political democracy as components of freedom, and on four other cultural characteristics with sufficient sample sizes in both latitudinal hemispheres: corruption and aggression as antisocial characteristics; trust and creativity as prosocial characteristics

Positive Shift, Social Projection, and Honesty on Social Networking Sites

Positive emotions are prevalent on Social Networking Sites (SNS) because of positive shift—users’ tendency to shift the expression of their emotions in the more positive direction. Emotion expressers aim to gain a more positive impression and elevate their social standing through positive shift, but little is known about the unintended consequences of positive shift for the expressors. Drawing on social projection theory and emotional journey theory, we argue that positive shift can lead to social projection and reduce the expressor’s perceived honesty of other SNS users—an important antecedent of trust and satisfaction with SNS, and this is more likely to occur when the user shifts emotions with higher emotional dissonance (i.e., difference between expressed and experienced emotions). We further propose a diversity reminder as a likely remedy that suppresses the social projection process. Using two experiments, we found evidence supporting these predictions. Our findings provide important implications

The Journey to Self: An Intra-personal Perspective of Emotion Regulation on Social Networking Sites

Although social networking sites (SNS) users often share positive emotions in the content posted online, their satisfaction with SNS and intention to continue using it vary greatly across users. We argue that a key to addressing this puzzle is how content creators up-regulate their emotions on SNS. Building on emotion regulation theory and belongingness theory, we characterize digital emotion regulation in two ways (i.e., positive shift and emotional labor) and propose a dual-pathway model that involves two self-views. By constructing three complementary studies, we find that it is emotional labor, rather than positive shift, that drives a user’s sense of belonging through anticipated self-enhancement (i.e., communal self-view) and felt authenticity (i.e., authentic self-view) and explains the varying outcomes. Our findings reveal the benefits of deep acting and countervailing effects of surface acting. The present research provides important theoretical and practical implications

Employee and Coworker Idiosyncratic Deals: Implications for Emotional Exhaustion and Deviant Behaviors

By integrating conservation of resources and social comparison perspectives, we seek to investigate how employees’ own i-deals, independently from and jointly with their coworker’s i-deals, determine their emotional exhaustion and subsequent deviant behaviors. We conducted a field study (131 coworker dyads) focusing on task i-deals, and used Actor–Partner Interdependence Model and polynomial regression to test the hypotheses. We found that emotional exhaustion not only mediated the negative relationship between employees’ own task i-deals and deviant behaviors, but also mediated the positive relationship between upward social comparison of task i-deals (i.e., a coworker’s vs own task i-deals) and deviant behaviors. These results demonstrated the intra- and interpersonal implications of task i-deals for emotional exhaustion and subsequent deviant behaviors. The current research not only shifts the attention from a predominantly positive view on i-deals to a more balanced and nuanced view on i-deals’ implications, but also sheds light on the interpersonal nature of i-deals and the emotional exhaustion implication of upward social comparison